Video editing software...

Can you recommend some open source video editing software which will allow me to cut & splice video without re-encoding the video? Every tool I've tried seems to want to re-compress the video to a different resolution and compression level than the original.

I think I can answer for him
You'll need to reencode the video. Most video codecs use interframe compression, which means your frames aren't complete for the most parts. Some are full JPEG images, assuring the picture quality from time to time, but most only contain the difference between the prior frame and the current one.
That is why you don't need 600GB to store an hour of HD content. But you can't edit it without the need to decode it first, and even if you could, then it would be a nightmare to re-encode, because the order in which complete and incomplete images are stored follows a pattern, which breaks during editing.

If you're interested in temporal compression, you can find more about it here.

Can you recommend some open source video editing software which will allow me to cut & splice video without re-encoding the video? Every tool I've tried seems to want to re-compress the video to a different resolution and compression level than the original.

Click to expand...

Virtualdub can do it. Just select direct stream copy for video and audio then trim as needed.

The basic problem I am trying to solve is that my camera, a Sony DSC-RX100 has some nasty habits regarding video. In spite of using EXFAT file system on the SD cards, the camera breaks the videos into 2.1 GB files. Also, to avoid taxes, Sony programmed the camera to stop recording video after about 30 minutes. On top of this, the camera will overheat while recording and stop. And sometimes I need to change the battery during recording.

My previous attempts to splice those files together resulted in an audio dropout of several seconds, and the picture freezing for about 8 frames, and the frames that should have been there completely missing.

Sony claims that using their software (which only works on Windows, Mac and PS3) will correctly combine the files without dropouts. I don't have either a Windows or Mac machine, but I do have a PS3. The problem with the PS3 is that it does not support any file system more modern than FAT32, so it can not even read the EXFAT SD cards, let alone join the files, or once joined, transfer them to any other media.

The format I have the files in is .MTS

Edit: I did some experiments, and it seems that I can just use cat to string the files together where the camera split the file but did not stop recording. If I try this on the files where the camera stopped recording, it will play, but the player has no idea how long the video is, and won't show the time in the progress.